Any ideas on acheiving this?

[Kevin Camp]

do you have trapcode’s particular? if so, you can use that particle system to do this effect.

if not, then you’d manually animate falling letters, that would cut to ink splats when the appear to hit the paper. then i’d animate a camera move.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[John Madison]

I have particular! This is what i have set up: Rigged camera to be above particular emmitter (which is set to drop letters based on gravity). Letters do fall, but i cant seem to drop them into a layer and have that layer appear slowly as if the letters are creating the layer. I’m not really interested in the ink splatter.

[Kevin Camp]

you’ll need to add a 3d layer/solid, rotate and position it to act as the floor. then in particular you’ll set the physics settings from air to bounce.

this will activate some bounce properties, there, you’ll choose your floor layer as the floor and set the collision event to stick.

the particles should now ‘stick’ when the hit that layer.

once you have everything set to your liking, you can create a matte to use to reveal the floor layer (or a layer that will appear on the floor, it can be a different layer than particular’s ‘floor’), but to do that you’ll need to particle systems with virtually the same settings…

so once everything is set up, duplicate you particular layer. i’ll call one the particle system and the other matte. in the particle system physics>bounce settings set collision event to ‘kill’.

do the same for the matte settings, but also set the particle opacity to zero and set the aux settings to emit particles at collision event. in the aux settings, you’ll probably want the life to be as long as the comp, 1 particle emitted, color from main 100%, opacity and size and what not the same as the main paritcles… and that should start creating your matte.

then you can use that layer as a trakmatte for another layer, so it should look like it is revealing as particles hit it.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[John Madison]

Thats a lot of suggestions there Kevin. Thanks. Okay, if you see in the video, the particles are only falling on the layer (to be revealed), whereas in my comp, there all over the place!!

[Kevin Camp]

ah, when you said slowly reveal another layer i thought you wanted the particles to act as a kind of transition to another layer… so you want the particle to change into another layer when they hit the floor (not a splat, but another layer).

got it (i think).

you’ll do just about the same thing, but your ‘matte’ particle system, as i called it, won’t be used as a trackmatte, and it will use a different custom particle that will be the particle/image that you want the falling particles to turn into.

so by the example, you’ll have one particle system using ‘letters’ as the custom particle and they will hit the floor and the collision event will ‘kill’ them.

the second, virtually identical particle system will use a different custom particle (the splats), but the particles will have zero opacity as they fall, but when the get ‘killed’ the aux system will emit a new particle (same as main), no velocity, color from main, etc…

so when the two play together, it will look like the falling particles turn into different particles/layers when they hit the floor.

however, i’m not sure when you say ‘slow’, that you mean the particles fall slowly, or they slowly change into another particle… what i’m describing will be like the sample. the falling particles (letters) will hit the floor (paper texture) and bam, they change into the new particle (the splat).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[John Madison]

Hey Kevin,

Awesome suggestions there, but suppose as in the example, i want the particles to fall only on the layer to be revealed and not all over the floor.
In any case, thanks for the help.

[Kevin Camp]

you can set the floor to be the floor layer’s alpha, so the particles only hit the alpha. that looks like how they set up the first shot in the sample.. you can see some of the letters don’t hit the paper, they just fade away.

for the later shots in the sample, they may have done the reverse… that is use a layer as an emitter, so the particles float out of the image’s alpha, then you’d time reverse the particle comp.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Arvin Bautista]

Think backwards, literally! Use particular to emit the inksplats/layers upward from the existing final text, telling particular to use the text’s alpha layer as the emitter.

Then precompose and reverse the shot!

You will need to do some experimenting with making it so that the emitter doesn’t continuously emit particles from the parts that’s already emitted (you may need to use two different final logo layers).

Good luck!

Arvin Bautista
Greasy Pig Studios
Los Angeles, CA
https://www.greasypigstudios.com